Baltimore City Paper

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1. The Punishment Begins Tom Breihan and Ray Cummings, two former Baltimore City Paper interns and big deal music writers who liked my amateur music blog, got me a meeting about possibly freelancing for City Paper with Bret McCabe, then the arts editor of the paper, back in 2007. Bret dropped a...

In the early days of City Paper, photography was almost an afterthought, with small, single images—usually a portrait or a photo of a restaurant front—illustrating long stories. Starting with the editorship of Evan Serpick, who published the first online galleries, photography become as important...

“Do you have a favorite writer on the staff?” Rebekah Kirkman, the City Paper visual arts editor and intern coordinator, asked on the other end of the phone as I paced nervously around my living room. Truth is, I hadn’t read the paper enough to know. “Joe MacLeod,” I answered, after flipping two...

If the nice Jewish boy from Upper Park Heights had gotten the teaching job at the historic Catholic high school for girls, the paper you are now reading might never have existed. “My interview went great,” Hirsch remembers of his chance to teach English at the Institute of Notre Dame in East Baltimore....

Recent Features

I started out at City Paper answering phones, a gig I got through the calendar editor at the time, with whom I worked at Video Americain. Once I made my artistic skills known (by doodling on Post-it notes), I was offered a job in the design department under Athena Towery. The job was more Tetris...

The woman who called to get the hose turned on sticks in my mind. It was a few years ago, during a heat wave. She lived in public housing, and the outside faucets didn’t work. Maintenance had shut them down for some reason. The kids were hot; it was too far from one of the few remaining open public...

When I tell people who apparently do not read City Paper that I work for City Paper and mostly cover art, I often hear in response something like: “That’s good—we need positive press about Baltimore. It’s not just murder and drugs here.” Because I rarely have the energy or patience to go down that...

“These used to be the servants’ quarters. The Irony is not lost on us.” That, or something to that effect, was what former City Paper editor Lee Gardner told me as he showed me around the top floor of a grand old house at 812 Park Ave., the paper’s headquarters, after my job interview. It was once...

Mobtown Beat

This week's low murder count is luck. There were 23 non-fatal shootings, including four double-shootings. Police arrested four people with handguns, and charged four people, including two women, with shootings. Keith Davis Jr. was convicted of murdering Kevin Jones. Tuesday, Oct. 17 7:37 p.m. Demetrius...

⬆︎ Rich Assholes Elon Musk showed up in Maryland the other day digging a hole, and Gov. Hogan heartily approved. "Get hyped," the governor tweeted, referring to Musk's The Boring Company and his plans to dig an underground hyperloop along MD RT 295. Meanwhile, Mayor Catherine Pugh sent a love letter...

↑ City Springs Elementary/Middle and Cardinal Shehan School students At City Springs Elementary/Middle, students in Wyatt Oroke's humanities class helped raise thousands of dollars for Hurricane Harvey relief. The story got the attention of "The Ellen Show," which featured a segment on Oroke and...

After a light week we're back to over one homicide per day. Baltimore has averaged about eight per week lately; the rate of killings is increasing despite city officials' efforts. Another of the four men shot on the 3200 block of Lyndale Avenue during the Sept. 26 mass shooting (the city's sixth...

The carnage continues. Tuesday, Oct. 24 2:22 p.m. Kendel Lecompte, a 27-year-old African-American man, was on the 1000 block of W. North Avenue in Reservoir Hill, when someone shot him. He died soon after at Shock Trauma. Lecompte had lived on the 5100 block of Chalgrove Avenue. 4:43 p.m. Antwan...

⬆︎ Baltimore Clayworks Over the summer we all thought Baltimore Clayworks was gonna be gone for good—with over $1 million in debt and a failed attempt to leverage the sale of their buildings in order to stay open, its board decided abruptly to close and file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. But after...

This week's Murder Ink covers the past two weeks of murders. There were 27 murders in the past 30 days. Police continue to seize illegal guns and arrest people, and shootings continue anyway: 15 people within the last week shot non-fatally. Federal agents closed four city murder cases, revealed...

Democracy in Crisis

The great Russian-American writer Masha Gessen was standing on the stage at Bard College in New York in front of a sign that read “Crises of Democracy.” It was the name of an Oct. 12-14 conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center there. "I think it's safe to say that all of us are living in...

Eats & Drinks

I first visited Ida B's Table (235 Holliday St., [410] 844-0444, idabstable.com) during the soft opening back in September while I was on my one-hour lunch break from my first-ever jury duty. I hadn't been selected, and ultimately would not be, though my entire panel was required to remain at the...More

The first time my wife and I walked into Uncle's Hawaiian Grindz (2315 Belair Road, Fallston, [443] 966-3999, eatatuncles.com) last spring, we were greeted by an unusual sight: In the big, wood booth that forms the backbone of the generous indoor dining room, Chef Kaimana Chee sat amid a family...

Primarily Maryland's chief tax collector and accountant, Comptroller Peter Franchot has in recent months become a leading advocate for the state's breweries—so much so that three have named beers in his honor. "Most politicians collect honorary degrees at commencements, I collect beers," he jokes...

"You can't be scared of shit, you have to be hard."- from "Spring Breakers" Try and imagine genuinely not giving a fuck for even just a moment. To let go of all the things so you're present enough that, um, I dunno, if you were, say, at a frat party, you could catch a beer launched your way, take...

'Pennsylvania Avenue Hustle,' off Todd Marcus' upcoming album, "On These Streets," an album powered by living and working in Sandtown-Winchester, is a manic tune that opens with foreboding cymbals and a running saxophone, and then dives into a frenzied, buoyant piano solo, soon sprinting, even...

Kung Fu Kenny, the 5-foot-5 giant and hip-hop's resident Vitruvian Man, awoke from his sleep to deliver us his fourth studio album back in April—"DAMN.," a proper follow-up to put detractors of 2015's "To Pimp A Butterfly" back in their cocoons. "DAMN." is a 14-track, 55-minute cathartic therapy...

Jason Isbell's "The Nashville Sound" is the summer soundtrack for those of us who fled small towns because of the sexism or the racism or the lack of opportunities, only to see all of those things amplified with the election of Donald Trump, rendering our hometowns almost hostile to our very existence....

Screens

The hydragogic high point of Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 movie, "Possession," an all-anxiety sci-fi/horror exploration of a relationship ripped apart, is the scene where a cackling Isabelle Adjani explodes in seizure, spewing blood and bile and other liquids—conflating miscarriage, menstruation, diarrhea,...More

By the time Robert Altman has dumped '50s leftover Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) into the '70s, the utopian dreams of the '60s are on the last legs of their own long goodbye. Hippie communalism has given way to new age self-help. The discourse of civil rights is being co-opted by institutions...

"Damn, where'd you come from," a man who just walked out of the Baltimore City Detention Center back in early June asked as he filled a plate with pit beef, watermelon, and vegetables and then—"Thank y'all, bless y'all." "We're doing like Jesus did," activist and chef Duane "Shorty" Davis, who...

Few things are as satisfying as a slow-motion shot of a bladed weapon cutting through a hanging pig carcass—the scccclk sound that comes as steel carves through flesh. This revelation comes via "Forged in Fire," History Channel's competitive reality show in which bladesmiths try to make the sharpest...

Visual Art

Nosing into the decorative white-painted wooden walls and peering inside Puerto Rican artist Eric Rivera Barbeito's piece titled 'Gracias,' a small house structure with a metal roof near the gallery's entrance, I feel a slight breeze against my knees coming from the AC unit that's blasting in this...

As artist Stephen Towns was heading south to watch the solar eclipse in South Carolina last month, pondering Nat Turner's epiphany which came to him during an eclipse in 1831 in Virginia, some of Towns' paintings that were inspired by Turner's rebellion were causing a stir at Goucher College. Now,...

Gloria Garrett is moving her hands. She is moving her arms in wide circles. She is pacing, gesticulating, dancing, and talking. Gloria Garrett talks loudly: "Those dolls are made from old sheets! You cover them with wax paper and then iron them. That wreath is made from a hanger. This is the picture...

In his essay 'Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,' James Baldwin writes about how the "American ideal" of sexuality and masculinity "has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies" and other such archetypes, resulting in "an ideal so paralytically...

A line spirals out from the fountain and wraps around the interior perimeter of the "Brutalist donut" that is the Hirshhorn Museum, spilling out onto the plaza beside the National Mall. Several hundred visitors are here—foreign tour groups, art students, tourists with selfie sticks, families with...

I. The river Amazon is a river. It is an extremely long and voluminous river. Passing through areas of bio-diversity, it is a good name for a company which sells books and diverse other products, this river. -Leontia Flynn, 'Jeff Bezos names Amazon,' from the collection "Relentless: Poems by Jeff...

Visual Merchandising: "The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace Visual Merchandising "The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace by Rebekah Kirkman I.The river Amazon is a river. It is an extremely long...

Much as the Parisian bourgeoisie of the late-19th century lived in an era of the novel, we are living in an era of the rock 'n' roll memoir. In the past six months alone we've gotten self-penned accounts by Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Johnny Marr, Maurice White, Phil Collins (his sadly...

Stage

"The Christians" Those who do not belong to megachurches tend to find them alienating, to put it kindly—and I count myself here. For one thing, there's the stripping away of any aesthetic value established by the old religions (say what you will about the Roman Catholic Church, at least they know...